FAangband 0.3.4

[Seany C]

Well done on the new version, Nick - several very silly thrall deaths until I worked out which 'd's were which...

One small point - on XP, the new font is tiny (amulets are almost invisible, for example). Is importing the '8 x 13' font from 0.3.3 and earlier likely to work? (I really ought to try this then report back but I'm stuck in the office)

[Nick]

One small point - on XP, the new font is tiny (amulets are almost invisible, for example). Is importing the '8 x 13' font from 0.3.3 and earlier likely to work? (I really ought to try this then report back but I'm stuck in the office)

It will basically work, but you'll get silly things like M m or M[^i]m instead of Mim. Have you tried the 10x14x, or 8x12xb ?

[Seany C]

That would be silly - I'll try those other two setting tonight - ta.

[Arralen]

It will basically work, but you'll get silly things like M m or M[^i]m instead of Mim. Have you tried the 10x14x, or 8x12xb ?

I tried both, and the first one is too big to be useful, and the 2nd to bold to be readable.

I really miss the 8x13 font, as it is the ideal font for 17" TFT display running at 1280x1024 resolution.

The new 8x12x font sucks anyways (not only because its too tiny): dots are not dots but small "_" .. which really give me trouble after some time .. looks like my eyes "think" they're not in focus and try to shomehow make dots out of those no-dots .. result: additional strain, iritation and after some time maybe headache. Yes, could be I should wear glasses but as I'm near-sighted, I normally can get along without in front of a monitor (as long as the presentation is ok, that is.)

[Nick]

I tried both, and the first one is too big to be useful, and the 2nd to bold to be readable.

I really miss the 8x13 font, as it is the ideal font for 17" TFT display running at 1280x1024 resolution.

The new 8x12x font sucks anyways (not only because its too tiny): dots are not dots but small "_" .. which really give me trouble after some time .. looks like my eyes "think" they're not in focus and try to shomehow make dots out of those no-dots .. result: additional strain, iritation and after some time maybe headache. Yes, could be I should wear glasses but as I'm near-sighted, I normally can get along without in front of a monitor (as long as the presentation is ok, that is.)

For next release, I will try to find a more acceptable font with extended characters (and if anyone knows anything about this, I'd like to hear). I'll also see about making the game default back to using normal characters if the extended characters don't exist - I'm not sure if this is possible, though. Or extended characters could be made an option, but I don't like adding options unless they're really needed.

For now, if you want to use the 8x13 font, you can get rid of the extended characters by going through the edit files and removing anything like ['i], ["o], etc - basically they're the only places where '[' and ']' occur except for spellbook names. In fact, the only edit files that have changed from 0.3.3 to 0.3.4 (apart from the version number at the top) are vault.txt, terrain.txt (no extended characters in these) and monster.txt, so the simplest thing would probably be to change the version number on the 0.3.3 files except for those three, and then remove the extended character stuff from monster.txt.

Or you could switch to linux - the new fonts look great there

[Pete Mack]

extended character sets.

You may want to check out Leon's original newsgroup post on the topic of extended characters. For one thing, he references 8x13x.fon in a link. Further, the xchar port is intended to be transparent (back-compatible) on old character sets, or incomplete character sets (like plain old latin-1.)

Do read the post--it really helps understand the design.

[Nick]

You may want to check out Leon's original newsgroup post on the topic of extended characters. For one thing, he references 8x13x.fon in a link. Further, the xchar port is intended to be transparent (back-compatible) on old character sets, or incomplete character sets (like plain old latin-1.)

Do read the post--it really helps understand the design.

Thanks, Pete, that's great. In fact, just reading that thread makes me feel all nostalgic...

[Nick]

The new 8x12x font sucks anyways (not only because its too tiny): dots are not dots but small "_" .. which really give me trouble after some time .. looks like my eyes "think" they're not in focus and try to shomehow make dots out of those no-dots .. result: additional strain, iritation and after some time maybe headache.

One thing you can do about this specific problem is to go into =, v for visuals and change the floor character from 46 to 7 or 8.

[Nick]

OK, don't say I never do anything for you.

[Pete Mack]

One thing you can do about this specific problem is to go into =, v for visuals and change the floor character from 46 to 7 or 8.

Or you can check Leon's newsgroup posting mentioned above, and download 8x13x.fon from the original source. I don't know if it will work, but it's surely worth trying.

[Nick]

Or you can check Leon's newsgroup posting mentioned above, and download 8x13x.fon from the original source. I don't know if it will work, but it's surely worth trying.

That link was broken for me, and I couldn't find such a file on his site. The one I've attached in my previous post was made using his instruction, though; it's the original 8x13.fon with xchars added (largely copied from 8x12x.fon...).

[Atriel]

The last week i picked FA to play harder... I really hadn´t much experience in FA before this week.

Here are some bugs and annoyances i´ve found

BUGS:
* My game crashed in the wilderness on reading an unknown scroll, i believe of light.

* My game crashes 100% of the times i use shift + ! (in my keyboard, ! is in the number 1, but i don´t believe this matters). I just put squelch mode to make squelchables invisible for now

* In the Vista(urgh) pc of my work, a somewhat painfull crash "killed" my best FA 3.4 char during the save-exit... hadn´t saved in awhile, clvl 25 adan paladin, save corrupted

* The UP key doesn´t work... Mildly annoying in the menus but then i am getting used to use the menu letters... Turning off Numlock also disables the UP from keypad. Ill take a look at the keymaps at home.

ANNOYANCES / Would be nice:

* It would be nice if Holy Light had its effects shown in the weapon examination, someday.
BTW, it seems that it is slighty underpowered for a specialized offensive melee-boosting (also in O) spec available only to 2 classes... rating under Fast Attack, Armsman, and of course Fury.
Underpowered because against non-undead non-evil, it does nothing. Against evil the bonus is so small... Realistically a bonus of 0.2 vs undead and 0.1 vs evil in most cases.. as the only slay weapons i´d use are Giants early. (In the rare cases XDragon or XUndead are used, bonus would be 0.2 Dragon / 0.3 Undead). It would benefit from a very, very small boost.

* It would be nice to have all viable items fit to some action show a list automatically, ala Entro/Heng, maybe in the form of an option.
Examples
Z (then all zapable rods would appear)
M A (then it would appear a list of all spells i am able to cast from the first book)

* Wilderness

Mountains are a huge pain! I hate mountains with a vengeance and now i realize that they were the main reason that made me slow to pick FA from the start... I always picked races that started in towns full of mountains and after taking minutes to traverse one map and seeing like 4 or 5 mountains forward.. so this probably happens with newbies trying FA too. As they are now they seem more like underground caves with lots of dead ends than mountains. I think it would be better if mountain roads were much larger ala MAngband (3/4 square roads), to actually look like a huge place, also improving the player awareness of the place. FA Mountains are more claustrophobic than many dungeons i´ve seen...
I believe that having enlightenment (rod or pots) would help (to traverse, not to their looks)
Door / Stair detection do not detect "winding ways of greater/lesser danger"... is this intentional?
Am i missing something else here?
Then after i started to avoid mountains the game got much better.
Wilderness is tough, but nice after you get the hang.. (xcept mountains!)
Plains are really cool. Sometimes they seem like a random generated "proud warlords" level.

Nick, thanks for maintaining this cool variant!

Keep up the good work
Daniel

[Nick]

BUGS:
* My game crashed in the wilderness on reading an unknown scroll, i believe of light.

Yes, there is an occasional problem with lighting - my guess is it's related to field of view changes I made for 0.3.4.

* My game crashes 100% of the times i use shift + ! (in my keyboard, ! is in the number 1, but i don´t believe this matters). I just put squelch mode to make squelchables invisible for now

Don't know what that is - I'll look into it.

* In the Vista(urgh) pc of my work, a somewhat painfull crash "killed" my best FA 3.4 char during the save-exit... hadn´t saved in awhile, clvl 25 adan paladin, save corrupted

That's bad, and I haven't seen it before - there have been crashes on exit in windows, but not savefile corrupting. I'll look into that too.

* The UP key doesn´t work... Mildly annoying in the menus but then i am getting used to use the menu letters... Turning off Numlock also disables the UP from keypad. Ill take a look at the keymaps at home.

Yes, combination of some pref file issues and the menu code still being newish - I should get this sorted out soon.

* It would be nice if Holy Light had its effects shown in the weapon examination, someday.
BTW, it seems that it is slighty underpowered for a specialized offensive melee-boosting (also in O) spec available only to 2 classes... rating under Fast Attack, Armsman, and of course Fury.
Underpowered because against non-undead non-evil, it does nothing. Against evil the bonus is so small... Realistically a bonus of 0.2 vs undead and 0.1 vs evil in most cases.. as the only slay weapons i´d use are Giants early. (In the rare cases XDragon or XUndead are used, bonus would be 0.2 Dragon / 0.3 Undead). It would benefit from a very, very small boost.

I haven't thought much about Holy Light, so this is very helpful.

* It would be nice to have all viable items fit to some action show a list automatically, ala Entro/Heng, maybe in the form of an option.
Examples
Z (then all zapable rods would appear)
M A (then it would appear a list of all spells i am able to cast from the first book)

So, not show rods which are charging, or spells which are unknown? that's an interesting thought. Any other opinions?

Mountains are a huge pain! I hate mountains with a vengeance and now i realize that they were the main reason that made me slow to pick FA from the start... I always picked races that started in towns full of mountains and after taking minutes to traverse one map and seeing like 4 or 5 mountains forward.. so this probably happens with newbies trying FA too. As they are now they seem more like underground caves with lots of dead ends than mountains. I think it would be better if mountain roads were much larger ala MAngband (3/4 square roads), to actually look like a huge place, also improving the player awareness of the place. FA Mountains are more claustrophobic than many dungeons i´ve seen...

Yes, I find them a pain too. I'll have a bit of a think about modifying the generation.

Door / Stair detection do not detect "winding ways of greater/lesser danger"... is this intentional?

Yes, it's intentional; I'm not sure if it's necessary, though. Opinions?

[Psi]

So, not show rods which are charging, or spells which are unknown? that's an interesting thought. Any other opinions?

I'm not sure that provides sufficiently more than the show options in lists that you already have...?

Yes, I find them a pain too. I'll have a bit of a think about modifying the generation.

I'd certainly vote for a more obvious path through the mountains!

Yes, it's intentional; I'm not sure if it's necessary, though. Opinions?

Though they are functionally equivalent, I'm not convinced that pathways fit into the same bracket as stairways. Stairways appear randomly, whilst a pathway can only be found at the end of a path (except in swamps).

[Nick]

Fonts and pref files

All the talk about fonts has made me realise that the extended character fonts also have the extra glyphs for doors, rubble, etc. So here is a screenshot using some of these for terrain (and my new 8x13x.fon based on the original windows default):

Is this a good idea, or not? I can make this work by pref files for sdl and x11, but it doesn't seem to work properly in windows (although I haven't tried very hard yet). I assume this is related to the blank walls in Vista problem - does that sound correct?